How would an assassination attempt be ‘staged’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — The image was instantly iconic: Donald Trump, moments after an attempt on his life, is surrounded by Secret Service agents attempting to rush him to a car. Face bloodied, he takes a defiant turn toward his supporters and pumps a fist into the air. An American flag waves in the background.

Was it too iconic? In the hours after a man tried to assassinate Trump at a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, baseless conspiracy theories about the shooting — and that photo in particular — flooded the internet. Some anti-Trumpers declared it too good to be true, arguing that the incident must have been “staged” to boost his campaign.

More than a year into Trump’s second term, the claim has acquired new life, now among prominent people in the MAGAverse, disillusioned with the man they once supported.

“Just admit you staged it in Butler,” comedian Tim Dillon, who helped drive support for Trump in 2024, said in an April 11 episode of his podcast. “It was the heat of the campaign. People do crazy things in campaigns.” As WIRED’s David Gilbert wrote last week, recent comments from Dillon, as well as right-wing personalities including Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, seemed to open the door to further conspiracy theories from the MAGA coalition.

Before “staged” entered English as a verb around the 14th century, the noun “stage” was in use a century earlier to mean a horizontal portion of a structure, floor or story of a building or a raised platform constructed to exhibit something for public viewing. In its earliest verb sense, to “stage” meant to set up a platform or scaffolding for construction. Later, it also became a term for the process of putting on a theatrical production and eventually, any event requiring planning and preparation. Both forms come from the Old French “estage,” meaning “dwelling,” and its verb form “estager,” meaning “to stay somewhere.” “Estage” is also related to the Latin “stagium.”

Around the 1930s, “staged” additionally came to refer to a particular kind of planned event: a situation deliberately faked to mislead people about what happened. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an early use in a 1935 story published in “The American Magazine,” in which a man reportedly “staged” an argument to gain the trust of a lumber company superintendent and secure an offer of employment from him. Other citations from the era refer to faked crime scenes.

Assassinations and attempted assassinations, combining both politics and crime, have proved especially ripe for claims that they were “staged.” The implication appears to be older than the word itself. After an assassination attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835, the opposition party accused him of faking it for public sympathy. A February 16, 1835 article in the “Republican Banner” reported the “Richmond Whig” as having insinuated that “the affair was got up, either to bring himself into notoriety, a passionate thirst for which abides in many weak minds, or by some deep-plotting traitor or traitors, who proposed by the experiment to revive and reanimate popular affections for the person of our ruler.”

Right-wing activists claimed that the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was a staged attempt gone wrong. And in 2022, after a man pointed a gun at Argentina’s then-Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner that misfired, Argentinians accused the ruling party of staging the incident to distract from Kirchner’s corruption trial.

The Butler incident, which unfolded on camera in front of thousands of ordinary witnesses, as well as reporters and photographers from major news organizations, didn’t seem to leave much room for speculation about what had happened. Visual forensics showed that a man climbed onto the roof of a nearby building and fired eight shots directed at Trump — one of which grazed his right ear and can be seen whizzing through the air in a photo captured by Doug Mills of The New York Times. The bullets killed an attendee named Corey Comperatore and seriously wounded two others before the Secret Service shot and killed the gunman. Hours later, the FBI identified the attacker as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.

But the urge to find a more dramatic story in it seems irresistible. Claims about who supposedly “staged” the assassination attempt have varied depending on the source — different people across the political spectrum have, without evidence, pointed the finger at Joe Biden, the FBI, Israel and even Trump himself.

Theories about what was “staged” and how are similarly underdeveloped. Those insinuating that the assassination attempt was an orchestrated plot have sought to raise questions about the FBI’s investigation into the shooting, a lack of clarity around the shooter’s motive and the president’s supposed lack of interest in discussing the event. What they don’t much engage with is the exceedingly complicated logistics and coordination that performing a fake assassination attempt in public would entail.

Federal investigations, as well as CNN interviews with former law enforcement officials, have revealed security failures and a lack of accountability over what transpired at the Butler rally. And even after breaking into the shooter’s phone and computer and interviewing friends and family, investigators have not been able to determine a clear motive or political ideology.

But as people raise questions about the Butler incident, they generally skip over one central question: Would it even be possible to have staged the events that day? How would anyone go about overlaying a fictional action sequence onto a live event, in real time?

Spencer Parsons, an associate professor of media production at Northwestern University and an independent filmmaker who has staged shooting scenes, gamely agreed to explore the hypothetical scenario of what it would have taken to stage the assassination attempt. He does not personally believe the assassination attempt on Trump was “staged.”

Parsons says the first thing to consider is just how many people are typically involved in staging a shooting for a normal on-screen production: the director, camera operators, camera technicians, lighting technicians, sound engineers, special effects coordinators, safety coordinators and so on. Now consider just how few people would need to be involved to keep something as monumental as a faked assassination attempt on a presidential candidate a secret.

When production crews stage a shooting, they have total control over the cameras, Parsons says. They can shoot multiple takes. They can manipulate angles to create certain illusions, which can take hours. They can add special effects in post-production, which can take weeks.

Staging a shooting in the round at a live event, with mere seconds to pull it off, would allow for none of this. There would be only one take. Journalists with professional cameras and spectators with smartphones would leave no room for digital manipulation. Every detail would instead need to be physically coordinated with exacting precision.

Parsons says the supposed staging team would need to position the fake assassin in a way that would allow the public to see him and thus make it seem real, and at the same time allow him to fire before law enforcement or security personnel who weren’t participating in the performance could notice and shoot him first. “This is a big bet,” says Parsons. “You have to have a kind of perfect timing in order to make that happen just right.”

Then there’s the issue of the fake assassin himself. The task would require an extraordinarily skilled marksman, someone who could aim close enough to the candidate’s head to make it look like he’d intended to hit him without actually hitting him. (Acquaintances of the gunman who tried to shoot Trump told reporters that he was rejected from his high school’s rifle club because he was such a bad shot.)

And to make the situation seem believable, the Secret Service would have to kill the designated shooter after he opened fire, an outcome the person in the gun-wielding role either wouldn’t anticipate or would have to be willing to accept. The killing of Comperatore adds another dead body to the hypothetical stage directions, or else marks things going hideously off-script, still without breaking the surrounding secrecy.

The blood would be another consideration, Parsons says. Film crews simulate gunshot wounds via squibs, small explosive devices that spout fake blood when detonated — some conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s assassination attempt claimed that he used a squib because the blood on his face was supposedly only seen after he raised his hand to his cheek, though researcher Katherine FitzGerald noted at the time that the first appearance of blood was not clear from the videos.

Another technique for staging bloodshed might involve the candidate superficially wounding himself with a small razor blade, like professional wrestlers do, but that also presents challenges. “A blade that he might cut himself with really needs to be eliminated from the scene,” says Parsons. “He has to be extremely careful not to drop such a thing. And if it’s sharp enough to deliberately hurt him, he might hurt himself in additional ways that wouldn’t make sense.”

Given all of this, Parsons finds the idea that an assassination attempt of this scale could be “staged” to be “tremendously unlikely.”

“This is just astronomically difficult to stage,” he adds. “The whole thing, from a filmmaking perspective, seems to be just immensely, immensely difficult and really based on a lot of chance.”

But as long as people are uncertain about or dissatisfied with the underlying explanations for why an incident happened, Parsons says, telling them that staging was physically unlikely can just invite more conspiratorial speculation.

Do the MAGA influencers reviving the idea sincerely believe that the Butler assassination attempt was “staged”? It’s impossible to know, and to some extent, it’s beside the point. Whitney Phillips, associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, says she’s less interested in whether the conspiracy theory’s promoters believe it than in why it seems to be so prevalent at this particular moment in time.

“It’s not that that question doesn’t matter, because, of course it does,” she says. “But you also have to think about the market pressures. You have to think about the attention economy, and you have to think about the fact that influencer culture is a culture of metrics. And these are the stories that are performing well.”

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